Free Radicals

Another title for this book might be Radical Pedagogies in Architectural Education, 195X-198X, but that kind of specificity would undermine its world-shaking ambitions. This is a volume that wants to have an impact beyond a delimited time and place, to radicalize pedagogy now and then, here and there. But the desire to get to the root of things is also, to some extent, a historical condition: People don’t necessarily want to return to first principles at all times; in fact, such investigations are relatively rare, bubbling up at moments of crisis. “Everything once considered normal had become the object of scrutiny,” Annie Ernaux writes in The Years, describing life in France in the immediate aftermath of May ’68. “The family, education, prison, work, holidays, madness, advertising, every aspect of reality was questioned.” One could include architectural education, too. Where are you coming from? Who do you serve? What is it that you are trying to build and maintain? These were the questions asked by the architects and educators surveyed here over the course of the long ’60s.

It’s difficult to leaf through this book and not be seized by some past-perfect form of wistfulness and nostalgia. The past is a foreign country, and the gestures and experiments (and the gestural experiments and experimental gestures) anthologized here seem light-years away from the bureaucracies that structure the architectural discipline and its schools today. This was a time of decolonial struggles and demands for human and civil rights, which, after considerable progress, now seem more in peril today than they have for a long time. After a crisp and extremely clarifying introduction by editors Beatriz Colomina, Ignacio G. Galán, Evangelos Kotsioris, and Anna-Maria Meister—the book grew out of Colomina’s graduate seminars at Princeton University’s School of Architecture, as well as a slew of exhibitions organized by the same cohort—the chapters roll out like a guidebook, or yearbook, with over one hundred short entries documenting architectural educational experiments everywhere from Long Island to London, Ife to Ahmedabad, Black Mountain to Mississippi. The book is emphatically global in scope and while the through lines of the zeitgeist are palpable, the multitude of students and faculty who appear here are not interchangeable. These stories are emphatically local even as they wrestle with the intense modernization and capitalization that characterized much of the postwar world.

With so many contributions one feels wary of identifying too many connections. A certain back to the land ethos, however, is hard to ignore. The book is full of images, and the reader finds many photographs of people en plein air, sitting on hillsides, generally outside buildings. While nude bodies are scattered throughout, there are as many different forms of technological media—radio and televisual waves, Fun Palaces and Media Labs—as bare bottoms. (There are plenty of coats and ties, too; radicality is not always outfitted in outré fashion, though it often seems to be gendered male.) School here wants to break out of the classroom and be broadcast, and, fittingly, this is the moment of open universities, global tools, environmental communications, information environments, hives, and thinkbelts. The connection, of course, between the back-to-the-landers and high-tech heads is that both were wrapped up in a post-building feeling, sensing that architecture with a capital A had passed. This is architecture in the expanded field, amid open systems, and perhaps as a result many of these projects are ideologically far-flung. What does radical mean, one might ask, if it can refer to both Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s Learning from Levittown studio, held at Yale in 1970, and the art schools built by Ricardo Porro in post-revolutionary Cuba? Are both getting to the root of the field? Or to ask the question another way, what is not radical? Is it simply anything falling outside the Beaux-Arts box?

Loaded with ambition and research in equal parts, Radical Pedagogies is an implicit dare to imagine what radical architectural education might look like today. Certainly, there has been a renewed interest in pedagogical experimentation in recent years in and outside of architecture: Julie Niemi’s publishing and exhibitions around Buffalo’s anarchist Tolstoy College (1969– 1985) come to mind, as does Marta Kuzma’s recent volume History of an Art School, which tracks the role of women at the Yale School of Art. (James Merle Thomas’s wonderful entry on the Womanhouse project undertaken at CalArts by Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro offers a crucial example of parallel play with Kuzma’s volume.)

This interest in past models seems all the more significant now that we have headed back to school post-Covid. It’s a moment for reflection, indeed. Is school something that we want to unthinkingly go back to? Are there other ways that we might come together and learn? I attended an architectural crit the other day in which the class had transformed itself into a collective and donned green aprons to signify, I think, that they were cooking up something new. They asked that their work be seen altogether, rather than as a series of best efforts at grabbing attention. The assignment was to design a small arts commune in upstate New York. Some of the old feelings, clearly, are in the air again. They don’t seem quite as explosive now, and perhaps it’s naive to ask that they should. But knowing more about the past does put a certain pressure on the future and what it might imagine.

If education is closely connected to the idea of norms (consider that educational institutions were originally called normal schools), then architectural education makes the connection literal. Follow the etymology of the word normal back to its origins and you will arrive at a carpenter’s square, and thus a world of construction, geometry, and making. Architecture builds norms, and Radical Pedagogies’ project is to question the discipline’s fundamental assumptions, and how they are perpetuated via educational initiatives—this is to say, it tracks how norms are made, and how we might unlearn them. In its emphasis on institution building—no matter how short-lived and jury-rigged these institutions may have been—this anthology offers a set of propositions about how architecture might structure the groundwork of life. In other words, how life itself might be built and lived.